David Lindsay-Abaire has spent the last six years populating Manhattan
Theatre Club's Off-Broadway spaces with quirky, candy-coated plays depicting
unusual women in even more unusual crises. Whether coping with recurring
memory loss, a sexually depraved husband, or hyper-advanced aging, his
heroines have always tilted against dangerously off-kilter worlds.

Now he's done a remarkable about-face: With the MTC production of Rabbit
Hole, which just opened at the Biltmore, Lindsay-Abaire is trying to shake
things up from within rather than from without by realistically tackling
real problems. He hasn't, however, yet learned how to write real people to
experience them.

Rabbit Hole is full of the kind of uniquely theatrical souls who populate
Lindsay-Abaire's other plays, albeit ones viewed through a less-severely
cracked lens. True, there's no one as zany as the lisping, limping burn
victim or the stroke-stricken mother from Fuddy Meers. But there's also no
one complex or specifically enough drawn to make the tragedy uniting them
all - the death of a four-year-old boy named Danny - feel like more than a
hoary vehicle for contemporary kitchen-sink drama.

Danny's mother, Becca (Cynthia Nixon), has lost interest in her house, her
husband, and her friends, and copes by erasing all traces of Danny from her
life. Her husband, Howie (John Slattery), can't persuade her to return to
the world of the living and is finding perhaps too much solace in his group
therapy. Becca feels that her newly pregnant sister, Izzy (Mary Catherine
Garrison), is throwing her own life away. And Becca's mother, Nat (Tyne
Daly), can't stop comparing Danny's death eight months ago to the death of
her son Arthur from a heroin overdose 11 years earlier.

With the death still fresh in their minds, no one is yet able to talk to
each other instead of at each other, let alone do anything else. They wring
their hands, dance around the issue, argue (Becca wants to sell the house,
Howie insists she's overreacting), and house comedian Nat is always on hand
to spout her beer-bar quips ("Look up 'kitschy,' see if it means 'crap'").
But it's not until Jason (John Gallagher Jr.), the teenage driver who
accidentally hit Danny, establishes communication with the family that
everyone is forced to at last face their grief.

It's the most difficult voyage most of them can imagine, so their unease is
on some level correct. And as Lindsay-Abaire's previous plays have revolved
on similar journeys - if to more specific physical destinations than
emotional clarity and acceptance - his dramatic temperament would seem ideal
for charting the slow but steady movement from darkness into the redemptive,
if not always rejuvenating, light of day.

But neither he nor the usually reliable director Daniel Sullivan can make
their motion anything but circular, as unsatisfying for them as for us. The
only pulsing sense of movement is provided by John Lee Beatty's predictably
spectacular set, which makes ingenious use of two revolves to create every
room in the family's home and allow split-scenes and instantaneous
transitions. Feelings, however, don't move with commensurate freedom.

Lines like "Things just aren't nice anymore" and "You're not in a better
place than I am, you're just in a different place," do especially little to
alleviate the shallowness of the proceedings, and they're what the dialogue
mostly thrives on. True, more important scenes are more carefully written:
Becca's tense second-act confrontation with Jason comes close to capturing
their respective states of mind. But there's a strong enough disconnect
between the words, the actors, and reality to make you question whether
Lindsay-Abaire and Sullivan are investing any of themselves or are simply
working from dictionary definitions of "loss" and "anguish."

This unavoidably spills down to the actors, most of whom portray the
emotions as little more than skin-deep brittleness. This is particularly a
problem for Nixon, who makes Becca so Ming-vase fragile that you can't
understand how she survived an hour without Danny, let alone months. Daly's
braying performance grates far more often than it amuses, and her
metamorphosis from common-sense dispenser into a caring shoulder for Becca
to cry on occurs too abruptly to ring true.

At least Slattery jumps in feet first and delivers a committed performance
that almost enables him to escape the clichés from which his role is
constructed (he's caught meeting another woman at a restaurant, a
misunderstanding leads Nixon to erase their most recent videotape of Danny,
and so on). Garrison, alas, has no character to play - Izzy's there only to
incite Becca at crucial moments - but she soldiers on with her usual spunky
flair.

Gallagher doesn't fare much better; Jason spends too much time up Subtext
Creek without a paddle, and he seems to approach life with the vacant stare
of a recovering videogame addict. But one's tempted not to fault the actor:
Gallagher's great at playing the Gawky Teenager With A Secret type that
Lindsay-Abaire loves including in his shows, as he demonstrated three years
ago in Kimberly Akimbo (that advanced-aging comedy), and this performance is
essentially that one, if anchored slightly closer to the real world.

Not that he would ever be confused with most real high-school seniors: The
glazed eyes, tentative vocal delivery, and lumbering, dreamlike physicality
aren't exactly representative, and his ramblings about alternate universes
(which give the play its title) would probably be more succinctly explained
by someone who truly believed it. But the character's discomfort is
understandable: He must live up to the responsibility of causing a child's
death, and that would cripple most adults.

Unfortunately, it always seems as though Gallagher is inside, frantically
scratching to get loose and show the real feelings beneath the outward
appearance that's been forced on him. Everyone else, sad to say, looks much
the same. One must admire Lindsay-Abaire's willingness to plumb uncertain
and unfamiliar depths, but he's trapped there, away from his element and
without access to the tools he apparently requires to give his plays both
bite and point. The problem with Rabbit Hole is that he, like his
characters, is too visibly struggling to find the way back to the surface.